“I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that’s my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again… the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul.”
~J G Ballard; science fiction author.
“I’m full of fears and I do my best to avoid difficulties and any kind of complications. I like everything around me to be clear as crystal and completely calm.”
~Alfred Hitchcock; producer, director and screenwriter.
“Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. ‘War and Peace’ must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room.”
~Anthony Burgess; author, writer and novelist.
“Love is the expression of one’s values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another.”
~Ayn Rand; author and philosopher.
“We’re not keen on the idea of the story sharing its valence with the reader. But the reader’s own life outside the story changes the story.”
~David Foster Wallace; author, satirist, artist.
“I think the function of suffering is to let me know that my perception is skewed; what I’m doing is judging natural events in such a way that I am creating suffering within myself. For instance, you have pain over certain conditions, certain situations that occur. And if you just say ‘ok, here I am, I’m going to experience the pain,’ you don’t suffer. The resistance and the degree of the resistance to the natural phenomenon of life causes tremendous suffering.”
~Hubert Selby Jr.; author.
“If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual.”
~Frank Herbert; author and philosopher.
“Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete.”
~Jean-Paul Sartre; author, philosopher and activist.
“Cynic: A blaggard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.”
~Ambrose Bierce; author, critic and satirist.
“To acknowledge the presence of fear is to give birth to failure.”
~Katherine Mansfield; author.